Visions of Sugar Plums
by grumkinsnark
Summary: The nightmares I can handle. It's when the dead are alive and dance in my dreams that my sanity slips.


**Visions of Sugarplums**

* * *

The nights I don't wake up screaming are the worst ones, exacerbated when Peeta smiles at me, says _You had a good night last night_. It's not his fault, of course, given that I don't tell him anything, but still it grates on me.

Nightmares I know what to do with, I know that I have to compartmentalize, that I need to bring out my fraying length of rope and knot and reknot it a few times. The ones when I wake up and my dream vanishes are the most debilitating, because it fills me up with hope I thought I'd lost long ago, only to disintegrate as my conscious mind whirrs to life.

In my dreams, everything is _right_. Prim is alive, dancing and giggling as Gale lifts her onto his shoulders and tries to keep time with the music. Finnick and Annie dance too, one hand each grasping that of a small child with sea foam eyes and thick blond curls. Mags and Rue and even Gloss and Cato stand around in contentment. Even my subconscious should know none of it is possible, that Annie will forever be a widow and Cato knew nothing but murder. But nevertheless there they all are, the Games long behind them.

The dream sometimes differs, sometimes we're in District One and the Careers show me their training grounds; sometimes we're in District Four where Annie teaches me how to find the most colorful shells and Finnick splashes me with seawater; sometimes we're in my old house where Mother makes us a grand meal and we celebrate the fact that President Snow couldn't silence us.

Much too soon the edges blur and conversation mutes, and though I claw at my head begging to stay asleep, everyone drifts away. My eyes open and once more Finnick is ripped apart by mutts and my arrow is embedded in Gloss's temple, and Snow _had_, in fact, silenced _so many_ of us. I eat Peeta's breakfast even though it tastes like ash in my mouth and tell him I'm going hunting when in actuality I go visit my old mentor.

I rarely see him alone except on these mornings, and I don't have to say anything for him to understand. I take a sip of whatever alcohol he has available but it's always too potent, so instead I settle for sitting at his table with him in silence, sometimes weeping but mostly just knotting my rope and trying to shove away the dreams. Every time it gets harder and harder, but I do it. If Annie can survive a dead husband and a difficult pregnancy and Johanna can survive horrors of which I still don't know the extent, I can survive this.

_I used to have them too, Katniss,_ Haymitch tells me. _But you can train yourself to forget. I did._

I doubt it, given his continued proclivity to drink, but I don't call him out on it. If he wants to lie, then I'll let him.

Annie invites us to her son's first birthday, and we go without hesitation. She loses concentration twice, but a few gurgles from her towheaded baby and playful bats at her hair bring her back.

When I wake the next morning and walk into the kitchen with Chaff's laugh still vibrant in my head, Annie is already there sitting at the table, unseeing. She snaps out of it when I enter, and gestures to a chair. I don't know how she knows what I've dreamt, only that when I look at her, she says,_ I see them too_.

_Do they ever go away?_ I ask.

She doesn't say a word, but her haunted eyes tell me everything.

And they don't. Twenty years down the line when I have my own young children, they continue to grab hold of me. The children help, just as Annie's had, but there are nights when the dreams assault and the dead come alive in my head as vividly as if it were all real. It's only when Peeta tells me that I've started to zone out of conversations now and then that I decide to tell him. It earns me sympathy I never wanted, and he proposes the system we still use to keep his hijacking at bay.

_Prim? Cinna? Madge?_ I ask him. His reply is steady, always steady.

_Not real._ I smile as if reassured.

_Not real, not real, not real,_ I tell myself each night. It works until the dreams come anyway, unbidden, and soon Cashmere reminds me how to thread a hammock and Finnick bounds down the stairs with sugar cubes stuffed in his mouth and Peeta's words change.

_Real, real, real._


End file.
